Hip-Hop and Sales: A Conversation on Image with Morgan Ingram

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Welcome to the live Better Sell Better podcast with your host, Kevin Dorsey of Inside Sales Excellence, the number one Patreon group and YouTube channel for tech sellers and tech sales leaders, where we dive in deep for tactical advice on how to book more meetings, close more deals faster and lead sales teams to success. But we don't stop there. We also focus on the person in salesperson. We talk about mindset goals, time management and so much more. So thank you for listening and if you're interested, head over to patreon.com inside sales excellence. Now with that, grab a notepad, get ready, and let's dive into the good stuff. If you think about hip hop, when it first really started, it had an image problem to cross over to mainstream. If you think about a lot of some, like the early bigger groups, there was an image problem. It couldn't seem to cross over until you started getting the likes of like the MC Hammers. The people actually started doing some like the flashier hip hop. And that's what like opened up the doors for some of the other hip hop groups then to cross over into that mainstream. And when I think about sales, I feel like we still have a pretty bad image problem, right? The image of a salesperson is still not a positive one. The lifestyle of a salesperson is still not a positive one. And so if you think about the transition that hip hop has made as an image and how that genre has evolved, could you see that applying to sales too? Like, how do we change the Persona or the image of sales? The way hip hop has kind of changed its Persona just to break through. That makes sense. Does the question make sense?

So from, from what I'm understanding, to recap it, because I understand, I think I understand where you're going is you're like, all right, when hip hop first started, I mean, it was straight street, right? Everyone was like, okay, that's for that over there. We don't want anything to do with it.

Right?

All the other genres were obviously top of the charts. They were doing their thing. It wasn't, it wasn't anything that anybody wanted to show shape with, right? Then obviously due to, let's say Run dmc, all these other groups are sort of coming into it. I became part of a culture and what that culture was is it got adopted by professional athletes, it got adopted by people in well known positions, even politicians, et cetera. And now it's like, oh, this is cool. So let's now start migrating to that. So what you're saying is sales in the similar Spot people like, ah, sales. Like, I guess I gotta go into this. Here I am, right? And you can obviously earn a lot of money in it, right? But what happens is it has a negative stigma for the lifestyle that you have working, the hours that you're working, being unhealthy as a whole. So am I understand that correctly on what you're asking here? Yes. Yeah. So this is something that I've always thought about, like, what is it? Because I never wanted to get into it because it was negative. I thought it was for people who were just super aggressive and they were liars. And I'm like, I don't want anything to do with that. And then obviously, as you get into it, you realize it's not even close to that when you do it the right way. I think one of the most important things is if you look at how hip hop has transcended is looking at how can we essentially get others to respect sales more. Right. And so it could be obviously other roles like a customer success or marketing or even CEOs, right. Coming out and saying, hey, sales is great. This is how you should think about it. Because essentially a CEO, at the end of the day, a business owner is the first salesperson always. Right? It's just CEOs don't really talk about that piece. Some CEOs are product focused and they're like, yeah, I don't want to have anything to do with sales at all. We don't need salespeople. Right. And so it really comes down to elevating great performances to where I get really disappointed, where even our own salespeople throw us under the bus.

Yes.

So that doesn't elevate the profession at all.

Right.

That's why it's in hip hop right now. I'm from Atlanta. You know, we've had multiple rappers get shot died in the past six to 12 months due to just beef. That's not helping the hip hop community at all. I watch the job in podcast, like every single week. I'm gonna watch it after this. Like, it's, it's. It's my thing that I go watch, right? And they chop it up in hip hop. And that's the thing right now. It's like there's beef where we don't need beef in the community, and we have that in the sales community. So how can we accelerate and elevate if we're having beef amongst each other and not figuring out ways to collaborate and really elevate the sales world? So I don't think there's one answer, right. I think there's multiple avenues to this, but I think the biggest piece is collaboration and having other voices elevate sales. Just like, if you think of hip hop, I mean, like, for example, what's. Oh, Nelly did a country song. It's like, what, right. You think of gcj, he did a song with. I think it was like, I forgot her name, but Kelly, I think something like that. And she was like a pop singer. So, like, that's what hip hop started do. It started to, like, be ingrained in the culture, in other songs people are playing in other areas. And the only way it's going to elevate is if people elevate sales from other positions as well. And then obviously it brightens up. But, I mean, that's my answer on that. And I think it's a topic conversation. Curious to hear what you think, Katie.

So what's always intrigued me about hip hop is not only did it eventually cross over, but in ways glorified a lifestyle that never should have been glorified.

Yeah.

And this is actually where I'm trying to bridge the gap is it made people want to. To be something that they never would have considered before. When west coast gangster rap started to spread across this country, and all of a sudden you started seeing Jheri curls. We had never seen Jheri curls before, and baggy caps and the Raiders jackets. And you saw people want to be something that they weren't, right? And it was just. And we all know people, by the way, who, like, became gangsters because of.

What they listened to happening late all the time, right?

Like, and it's that something that's always been interesting to me is why. Why did people make the leap to, like, I want to be that? And it's something where I think within sales, we don't actually, I think, do a good job of glorifying the sales industry, right? So, yes, we've got the beefs that tears us down, but I also don't think we glorify it enough of, like, here's all the great stuff that comes from it, right? Even Run dmc, they were the first ones to start coming out with the big old chains. And people are like, oh, well, shit. Like, I want those. I want to be able to dress like that, talk like that, have the accolades, have the music videos. And so that's one area where I think as an industry, besides not tearing ourselves apart, I think we can do a better job as an industry of glorifying the lifestyle of sales, even if it's not that good. I knew real gangsters, all right, that lifestyle is not good, but people wanted it because of the perceived connotation of what that lifestyle was like. And I think that's where we miss as a sales industries. I don't think we do a great job of glorifying the lifestyle. So that's. That's my thoughts on it. It's just like, I think we can do more to elevate what this can be, right? Where a young black man like myself with no college degree can be making what I'm making and doing what I'm doing and having the platform that I have. There are no other careers out there other than being a rapper or a ball player that would allow me to do what I'm doing right now. Sales is probably the only one. So it's things like that that I think about often is how can we glorify the. Why just glorify, right? Like just glorify what we do more and the perks of it, right? Like there's these old school sales groups I'm a part of on Facebook. I don't know if anyone else is too, but like the sales pros and like sales. Something from Ryan Stewart, right? And it's all like the car salesman and door to door salesman and insurance salesman. It's all of that, right? And listening to them like fight and bicker and do all this about, like, who actually made 100 grand last year, right? They're like, ah, blah, blah, blah, and all this. And it's like, dude, I know SDRs that make $100,000 and they're not standing on a car lot for 60 hours a week, you know, like for people that don't even know that that's possible. So I think that's something that we can do.